Totsie Hughes: basketball star, traveler, cancer survivor

Jamie Parker @jamiepa48637444

Thursday

May 17, 2018 at 2:01 AM

Betty Jean “Totsie” Hughes was a star athlete at Bryan County High School.

An April 27, 1961 story in the Pembroke Journal noted that Hughes, a senior guard, had been selected by the Macon Telegraph to the Class C All State Team after the Lady Redskins had played in the state championship tournament in Macon the prior February.

“We were up there playing for the championship and we lost by one point,” Hughes said. “…it was the only sport they had for girls then, but too I just loved the competition. I liked running and jumping. The only thing we had that girls could do, as far as I remember, was basketball.”

But she didn’t stick around long to bask in her glory, a short time later Hughes was on a Trailways bus.

“The day after I graduated I left home. I went to California, the Bay area, up around the wine country is where I went first and then back down to the Bay area,” she said.

But 1961 wasn’t the adventuresome Hughes’ first solo trip to the Golden State.

“My oldest sister, when I was about a year old, married a man from California. She was living out there with him and her family. When I was going from the seventh to the eighth grade I went out and spent the summer and fell in love with it. I said when I got out of high school that’s where I was going. She wanted me to move out there then. My other sister had moved out there when she was in the ninth grade. But I didn’t want to because at the time our school system was better than theirs. Plus they didn’t have any sports for the girls,” said Hughes. “It took three or four days. It was exciting.”

Prior to that the only place outside of Bryan County had been was Savannah and that was always with a parent.

“Back then I don’t think you had to worry as much about the meanness that is going on now. From when I got on the bus in Pembroke until I got off the bus in San Francisco I had no contact with the family,” she said of her first trip west.

After arriving in California for the second time Hughes worked in a variety of jobs.

“I worked for the telephone company, I worked for electric company, the Army-Air Force Exchange Service, I worked for the plumbers union, and I worked 24 years for Roadway Express, the trucking company, that’s where I retired from,” she said.

When retirement came Hughes wanted to stay in California but figured all she would be doing is existing because of the high cost of living there. So back to Bryan County she came and got busy.

“She came back and volunteered for meals feeding people, homeless and shut ins. She would come to the center, her and my wife, they would cook meals, then get in their cars and go deliver them to people who needed a meal,” Pembroke City Council member Johnnie Miller said.

When you ask Hughes will tell you she’s had a good life. But there is more to the story. She has faced her share of troubles as well.

In 2005 two of her brothers died on the same day. One died from inoperable lung cancer, the second, from a blood clot. She has battled cancer twice.

“I had lung cancer. They found it in 2014, in 2015 I had surgery, chemo and radiation, and it has been gone since. This year they found a cancer on my left kidney. So they removed it and it’s all gone now I don’t have to have radiation or chemo, the surgery took care of the cancer,” she said. “I am fine. My other kidney is working 100 percent. You can live forever with one kidney.”

Now at 75 Hughes says she has no plans on slowing down anytime soon.

“I still like to travel and go see all different things. I went to Europe and I’ve been to Ireland. I went on a cruise and I am going on another cruise in February. And I have been back-and-forth to California,” she said. “I have had a good life, a very good life.”

“I’m still just going strong. I’ve got lot’s to do before I bite the dust. My advice is to enjoy every minute, every single minute of your life that you possibly can because you never know when it is going to be gone. If you get sick don’t give up, keep fighting. And don’t feel sorry for yourself.”

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